Monthly Archives: March 2014

There are many things a boy or girl must learn if the magic of childhood is to remain intact, as it should in this forever scary world made by adults. One certain skill is the art of burping.
I recently instructed my grandson Sam in this most necessary practice, not by direct teaching but by example. We both enjoyed carbonated beverages, seltzer actually. I let nature take its course, and in a few minutes I had bubble relief. I said nothing to Sam and just went about my business. The grandson continued watching Ninja Turtles. Not long after, Sam got up, and I heard a noticeable burp. He said nothing, so I assume the lesson has been learned and the torch passed to a new generation. Sam knows burping is natural and that it is acceptable.
What makes it acceptable is that, by example, I burped with dignity, covering my mouth. Sam saw that and got the message.
The point of the story is that Sam enjoyed his burp, as did his grandfather. This growing boy, a child of innocence and wonder, who though he soon enough will be older and then a teen and then an adult, with all the worldly weight that carries, found a moment of priceless delight without guilt, one that required no heavy instruction from the tall people — adults.
My wish is that Sam, whenever he burps, no matter when he does that, even at age 99, remembers his grandfather’s silent example.
Life does not have to be complicated, and if most of Sam’s lessons are learned as easily as burping, he may not ever leave a childhood behind. Would that we all should keep that connection.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

The first rule of old newspapering, when there were composing rooms where pages of metal type were assembled for the press, was to make a friend of a printer. Otherwise, he could do you and your career harm.
“Printers” was a general term for anyone working on the production or mechanical side of pre-computerized newspapers, including the typesetters who used large machines to cast type lines of type from lead and compositors who assembled those and other metal pieces such as artwork into a page. The printers were men took years to learn and hone their exacting craft, and they worked in composing rooms that often hit over 100 degrees because of the lead-melting machines.
If you toiled in the newsroom as a page layout fellow, or if you were an editor of any sort, you had to make a printer your friend. They not only produced the type you needed to get pages completed before deadline, a finish line by which your career was daily gauged, but they helped you read the backward type where all your errors lie. Being a friend was not always easy.
As in any profession, there are cheerful and grumpy sorts, competent and more competent, natural “teachers” and not. And, no matter our disposition, we all have good days and bad and in between, so each new session with the individual known as “printer” was yet another challenge in helping give birth to news delivery every day.
Among the printers at my wonderful old stand, the original Journal-News of 53 Hudson Avenue in Nyack, N.Y., was “Big John” DeSevo, whose cigar was a permanent facial feature, lit or not. He was 20 years on the job when I met him, having started as a composing room gofer, then typesetter, then compositor.
I was dummying or laying-out the Local page in those days, which was the second front page, this one highlighting major local stories that did not make page 1 or go inside. It had to have a neat look, this presentation cover, with strong-enough headlines to grab readers and photographs that also caught your attention. John was my main man, the printer who did my page and saved my rear end numerous times.
He could not be bought by false praise or chitchat. If he liked you, and that usually was related to your competence, you did OK with him. If he thought you were a newsroom idiot who hadn’t so far bothered to learn reading type backward, then on John’s bad day, you could be lost. Or worse, harmed.
One morning, near the 10:15 deadline after my own pages were put to bed — sent off to the pressroom where forms would be made and fitted to the rotary printing presses — John was called to the other side of the composing room and asked to work with Tom on an inside page, the one with obits and last-minute news. Tom was a snarly fellow, full of himself and not practiced in the news business. Whatever job he had moving up was too short to learn much, but he had risen to city editor nonetheless, or maybe because that is often how it’s done.
Well, Tom was in a rush. He simply wanted the page finished, and he told John to hurry. John did not hurry. His name was on the page, and he wasn’t going to see mistakes on 35,000 copies. So, he took his time, even with deadline a minute away.
Tom didn’t like that and elbowed Big John, who for once lost his cigar, turned a mighty red, took a deep breath into his 250- pound frame and “pied” the page’s type, all 200 pounds, onto the floor and Tom’s shoes.
“Pied,” you ask? Well, in the great and honorable world of old composing rooms, pied type is jumbled or mixed up. That it was, sitting on the floor and enough on Tom’s shoes and now sore feet.
Tom missed deadline. And not a person in the newsroom, not one in composing ever blamed Big John, who remained with the paper until retirement decades later. Tom? He was soon gone.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This may be reproduced.

On an expectedly festive St. Patrick’s weekend that began in low spirits with three favorite draft beers out of stock at a village pub in my outer New York area, a mortal sin, my namesake hiked spirits when he ran 13th out of 3,500 in the Shamrock Marathon on Sunday. That was worth drinking to.
So is my mother, an Irish lass born on St. Patrick’s Day, the daughter of Mary Bonner and John Lyons, a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks. Six years later Patricia would lose her mom, waking one morning to her lifeless being, a grandmother I never knew, gone at age 32.
Those days in the first quarter of the last century were not easy for many, and Mary and John had their troubles. They lost 10 of their 13 children, some to the worldwide flu pandemic, others to the raw dangers of at-home birth. Patricia survived and so did John, the first born, and William, the last. With their mother gone and a father unable or unwilling to care for them, all three were sent to orphanages.
None ever complained nor overly judged. My mother was as Irish as tea in her acceptance of misery and fate, of the dirge that is every Irish person’s accompaniment. Yet she never sang that song for her own two children, working hard for family and home and not looking back at the ghosts always chasing her. Her wit was inherited, to be sure, and she recalled enough of the old stories to pass on.
My own childhood was made festive enough on St. Patrick’s Day by the stories, the wearin’ o’ the green and the grand family birthday my father always arranged for Patricia. She had many more than Mary, until Alzheimer’s eased her from the ghosts but also from we, the living. A long, sad goodbye, that.
But this is St. Patrick’s Day, or it will soon be after this column’s posting, and so my mother’s birthday. Grand it was that her grandson Arthur 4th, in a run called the Shamrock no less, gave her a present in his fine win.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This essay may be reproduced.

With Daylight Savings Time officially installed, the one hour we lost from sleep over the weekend has been quickly forgotten in my parts of the Northeast, 20 miles or so from New York City. But Gotham has had nothing to do with the wonderful freshness of what soon has to be spring.
Though winter may still show itself in cold and snow, it lost some of its icy tongue in recent high 40s temperatures and must inevitably see its potency whither. Winter must move on, just as fall did. Queen of the mountain will be spring in all its fragrance, showering of color, crops beginning, longer days and the promise of renewal in body and spirit.
Years ago, even before I learned the calendar, and certainly eons back when there were none, spring announced itself not so much by date but by a single whiff escaping winter’s breath, a distinct freshness not unlike the smell of wash your mother hung out on clotheslines, if you were lucky enough to have one who did.
Walking home from school in those days I knew — we knew — it was spring, or the promise of it, when we carried our winter coats. We had been buttoned up morning-side, with scarf, but the sweat began flowing in the warmer sun at about 2:30 dismissal time, the warmth itself a teaser that beyond even spring is the hot summer.
My longings, thankfully, have been few in this life, but if I had to add to those unfulfilled, it would never be a lack of seasons. Though I may not always chill out over winter’s cold, and though heat and humidity are never my friends, the beauty of a fresh snowfall, the crispness of leaves fallen and, especially, the potential that is every spring tells me I must never leave where I am.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

Westwood, N.J. — Rising taxes, a dwindling middle class, O-Care debate, world events and life itself are so full of uncertainties and dilemma that we all need a day off. I got mine recently in a fabric store in this Bergen County borough. Oy, what an experience.
Time does stand still in places, and Discount Fabric King is one such oasis in hurly-burly living. The interior looks 1952; some of the fabric may be older than that though the newer styles are there, too. In fact, you could probably order any pattern in the world from the many style books thrown here and there but quickly accessible. There are bookstores like this, where tomes are piled to the ceiling but the bookseller knows where everything is. So, too, at this Jersey fabric palace.
On a recent awfully cold day, the sort we used to, have in, well, 1952, we were there to find upholstery for two old wing chairs that should be saved. While I didn’t enter the cloth discussion all that much, the trip was worth it since I like 1952 scenes; as a photog and painter I always look for color and pattern; there was steam heat that warmed us like a grandmother’s home; and as a writer the more characters I meet the better. There were two such jewels here in this comfy place.
First, the owner. Name not important. What he is is the point. Head full of fabric knowledge; easygoing, patient manner as a businessman helping guide selections, never a simple task; a fellow for whom the “deal,” the sale, is what makes the day, not the money. One way or another, behind the wonderful charm, was a fellow going for the order, and he did that easily. If he were a cat, he would have been purring as we left the store.
And then there was the counter lady, obviously long in the business. Knowledgeable, too, she looked you in the eye, kept her presence with you and still was able to say what was where, pointing with her head. When it came time to cutting fabric for a customer, she was still talking, hardly looking down as her scissors glided through, cutting the goods almost without ever closing the scissors. And the folding, the folding! Maybe she glanced down twice as she took five yards and deftly folded over the fabric, beginning with a doubling, then another doubling and so on, pushing the accumulating pile out for another fold, ending up with a completed pile so neat that it seemed to have hospital corners.
Now, you don’t meet people like those two very often. Not nowadays. Not in fast-food places where employee turnover is as quick as the burgers eaten. Not in glossy super-duper markets. Not in banks just taken over by yet another bank. No, two well-practiced, friendly, self-educated people long on the job in a very old, non-frilly place who, once again, made me trust in humanity.
They gave me a nice day off from the cares of the world.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This essay may be reproduced.